Howie Carr (39 page)

Kevin Weeks and John Martorano also testified against him. Weeks’s most memorable moment came when he quoted Whitey’s words as he’d counted out cash for his annual holiday payoffs to the local constabulary: “Christmas is for cops and kids.”

Martorano’s testimony at the Connolly trial devastated Billy. Martorano recalled Whitey telling him how Billy had instructed Zip to take care of Whitey. Now Chairman Burton had a reason to call Billy as a witness.

After Martorano testified about the two-carat diamond ring that Zip had taken from Whitey in 1976, Connolly’s ex-wife was called to confirm that she had indeed received a two-carat diamond ring as a gift from Zip that year. Liz, Zip’s second wife, twenty years his junior, watched in stony silence as the ex-wife testified, and the media duly noted that if Zip hadn’t dumped her for Liz, she would have been precluded from testifying against him.

Also offered as evidence was an FBI training video from 1983, in which the future defendant intoned, “It’s my belief that you should never pay informants.”

He did not say whether he thought informants should pay FBI agents. And in what might have been his epitaph, Zip solemnly lectured the young agents-in-training: “Never try to out-gangster a gangster.”

As the trial wound down, the papers speculated that perhaps Zip’s low friends in high places had managed to slip a ringer onto the jury, “a Hibernian highwayman,” as one columnist put it. If Zip could get a mistrial, the theory went, despite the overwhelming evidence against him, perhaps he could finagle a plea bargain, which he had angrily rejected before the trial began.

But it was not to be. Zip was found guilty on several serious charges, including obstruction of justice and racketeering, although he was not convicted of setting up any of the three FBI informants that Whitey murdered. Zip was sentenced to ten years in prison. If he is not convicted of any other crimes, he will be eligible for parole on June 15, 2011.

As 2002 began, despite the controversy that now enveloped him, Billy still felt he could hang on a few more years. Even if the next governor was a foe, it would take him years to gain a majority on the UMass board, and if the next governor was a friend, Billy would be able to survive indefinitely.

But Billy’s luck finally failed him. Jane Swift had succeeded Paul Cellucci as governor a year earlier, when President Bush appointed his longtime supporter ambassador to Canada.

But Swift had been buffeted by a series of minor scandals, and it was obvious she could not be reelected. Enter Mitt Romney, a wealthy Republican businessman from Belmont, a graduate of both Harvard Law and Harvard Business Schools. In March 2002, a poll showed Romney leading Jane Swift among Republican voters by a margin of 72–11, and three days later Swift dropped out of the race for reelection.

Billy was backing state Treasurer Shannon O’Brien, a former state senator and the daughter of a governor’s councilor who had served with Sonny McDonough. Shannon had an impeccable hack pedigree, but she ran a surprisingly inept campaign. She sealed her fate in the final debate against Romney when she tried to make a joke about, of all things, parental consent for teenage abortions. Wearing an all-black outfit that accentuated her weight problem, Shannon suddenly flashed a weird grin at debate moderator Tim Russert and said, leeringly, “Want to see my tattoo, Tim?”

Mitt Romney won convincingly, and it couldn’t have come at a worse time for Billy.

Billy went to work on the new governor-elect immediately. He had co-opted the last four governors, so he had no reason to believe that Romney couldn’t be brought around with a little blarney and bluster. But just in case he couldn’t work his magic one more time, Billy wanted to make sure his pals were taken care of. Lame duck Governor Swift found a Superior Court judgeship for Stevie Flemmi’s lawyer, Ken Fishman. Billy’s $175,000-a-year top aide, Jim Julian, had a younger brother named John who worked as an assistant district attorney in Boston. Swift appointed John Julian to an open district court judgeship on Nantucket.

But even as judgeships for his loyal retainers were being arranged, the U.S. House Committee on Government Reform was painting a target on Billy’s chest. Chairman Burton would be holding his next series of hearings in Boston, and a couple of weeks after Romney’s election, the committee issued a subpoena for Billy. Billy had researched the situation, and he knew that under the new rules of the House, Burton was term-limited as a chairman. Come January, he would be replaced as chairman by Tom Davis of Virginia, an Amherst College graduate who Billy was certain would be amenable to working something out privately.

So Billy decided to duck the appearance. He made no such pronouncements himself, of course, but his minions put out the word. Burton was nothing more than a “habitual headline fiend,” as one of Billy’s lickspittles in the press put it. But then someone asked Governor-elect Romney what he thought of the impending Bulger no-show.

“I believe,” he said, “that President Bulger has a responsibility, as all citizens do, to respect Congress by responding to their subpoena.”

That changed everything. Billy couldn’t afford to alienate the man who would be appointing the trustees to the UMass board for at least the next four years.

Then Billy suffered a staggering setback, when transcripts of his 2001 testimony before the grand jury suddenly appeared on the front page of the
Globe
. All the devastating quotes about not wanting Whitey captured were suddenly on the public record.

On Friday, December 5, Billy appeared at the old McCormack Courthouse in Post Office Square. The press, including some of his most severe critics, sat in the jury box, just a few feet away. With C-SPAN broadcasting the hearing live, Burton began by reading a quotation from Edmund Burke: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

Billy stared straight ahead. He was usually the one who quoted Edmund Burke to great effect. Present that morning were two Republicans, Burton and Chris Shays, from Connecticut, and three Democrats, all from Massachusetts—John Tierney, Marty Meehan, and Bill Delahunt, the former district attorney of Norfolk County, whom Whitey had long ago disparaged in Zip’s FBI reports. Neither Meehan nor Delahunt were members of the committee, but would be allowed to ask questions. The other Massachusetts congressman who served on the committee, Steve Lynch of South Boston, the Bulgers’ recent nemesis, was running late.

Burton, a graduate of the Cincinnati Bible Seminary, looked down at Billy and asked him if he had anything to say for himself before the committee began questioning him.

“I believe,” Billy said haltingly, “my attorney if it, if it, uh, if it, uh, is acceptable would like to make a statement.”

Burton smiled wanly. “You may confer with your attorney, but we want to hear from you, so could you pull the mike close to you, sir?”

Then Billy read from some notes, citing Rule 11k(5), which allowed the committee to proceed in closed session if the hearing “may tend to defame or ridicule the witness.”

In other words, Billy wanted the press expelled, so that he could take the Fifth behind closed doors. Burton smiled again. The hearing was not going to be closed. Burton ran his committee hearings much the same way Billy had run his state Senate deliberations—everything had been hashed out beforehand, behind closed doors. When the congressmen appeared in public, at least at these sorts of regional hearings, everyone was on the same page. The vote by the committee members not to close the hearing was 4–0, with the tardy Steve Lynch arriving just in time to join the two Republicans and John Tierney to make it unanimous.

Burton immediately asked Billy if he knew where James Bulger was.

“On advice of counsel,” Billy said, “I am unable to answer any questions today. This position is based among other things on privacy and due-process rights and the right against being compelled to provide evidence that may tend to incriminate oneself, all of which are found in the Bill of Rights.”

Burton adjourned the hearing, and Billy rushed for the courtroom door, several of his sons behind him blocking the reporters tumbling out of the jury box in pursuit. Accompanied by a flying wedge of beefy state court officers, Billy scurried down the back stairs of the courthouse toward a double-parked sedan out on Devonshire Street, like so many just indicted State House pols before him.

In the hallway outside the courtroom, Billy’s attorney told UMass students watching on television that their president’s refusal to testify in a congressional probe of organized crime was merely “a lesson in civics... [that] this constitutional protection exists to protect the innocent.”

Meanwhile, on the other side of the hall, Burton addressed his comments directly to the oldest Bulger brother.

“If Whitey [is] paying attention today,” he said, “he could have done his brother a real service by turning himself in. I’m sure taking the Fifth Amendment is going to cause Mr. Bulger a great deal of concern.”

Billy had always been lucky. With a couple of exceptions like 75 State Street, everything had always broken right for him. Now nothing did. Every few weeks, it seemed, new lawsuits were filed by survivors of one or another of the victims of Whitey and Stevie. The families of John McIntyre, Deb Davis, Brian Halloran, and both Wimpy and Walter Bennett all filed civil suits against the U.S. government, claiming that the FBI’s protection of Whitey and/or Stevie had resulted in the murders of their loved ones. In almost every news story, Billy Bulger’s name would be mentioned along with his brother’s. But Billy had gotten used to that.

Then, in February, Will McDonough, Billy’s childhood friend and 1960 campaign manager, died suddenly while watching
ESPN SportsCenter
. For Billy, McDonough’s death was a crushing blow. Will was a contemporary, and, like Joe Moakley, he had always stood by the Bulgers, in good times and bad. At the funeral Mass at St. Augustine’s, Billy collapsed and had to be wheeled out on a stretcher. Moments after the videotape appeared on TV, cynical talk radio callers began suggesting that “the Corrupt Midget” was setting himself up for a 72 percent tax-free disability pension—“white man’s welfare,” as Billy’s constituents always called it.

Billy and Mary flew to Florida. Ostensibly Billy was “fund-raising” for UMass, but it appears that after forty years of taxpayer-funded junkets, he was enjoying one last “trade mission.” He spent days holed up in the finest hotel in Palm Beach, The Breakers, where sixty years earlier James Michael Curley and Joseph P. Kennedy had been turned away as undesirables. Times, and standards, had obviously changed.

Back in Boston, Romney was laying waste to whatever little reputation Billy had created for himself as a university administrator. The UMass payrolls were leaked to the
Herald
, and soon they were posted on the Internet, available for perusal by faculty members who had gone years without a pay raise. The UMass payrolls had been larded almost beyond belief. There was layer upon layer of bureaucracy—entire new levels of Bulgerite hack-ocracy had been created in less than seven years. Everyone in both academia and politics, it appeared, had been allowed to hire or promote whomever they wanted. The husband of the state rep from Amherst, a history professor, was being paid $128,000 a year. An obscure former state rep was making $125,000 as an “associate chancellor.” There were new provosts, chancellors, and deans by the dozen, all making more than $100,000.

In February 2003 came word of the first confirmed Whitey sighting in six years. On September 10, 2002, a British man walking in Piccadilly Square had spotted an American gentleman he’d made the acquaintance of back in 1994, when the American was staying at a local hotel and working out daily at a neighborhood health club.

The British man recognized his old friend, who was tanned and now sporting a goatee, and asked him how he’d been. The American, shocked at being recognized, told the Brit he had the wrong man, and then set off quickly in the opposite direction. The Brit thought no more of it until a few months later, when he was watching the movie
Hannibal
. When he noticed a brief shot of Whitey as the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List appeared on the screen, the Brit decided to tell Scotland Yard of their brief meeting.

Weeks later, the FBI discovered a safe-deposit box registered to James Bulger at a Barclays branch bank in Mayfair. Inside the safe-deposit box, police found more than $50,000 in various currencies and a key to another safe-deposit box, in Dublin. Then word leaked that Theresa Stanley had told the FBI about the Barclays box in 1996.

“I find that interesting,” Congressman Burton commented on this latest example of FBI ineptitude. “There was either some sloppy work done or they didn’t want to do it.”

America’s Most Wanted
put Whitey back in the spotlight, running segments on him February 22 and again on May 3.

Whitey’s photo appeared in the British media, and soon there was another sighting, this time in a military memorabilia shop in Manchester, where he was reported to have been buying Nazi memorabilia. It turned out not to be Whitey, but that news wasn’t announced to the media until months later.

Unable to keep his brother’s name out of the headlines, Billy continued trying to negotiate a deal with Davis, who had succeeded Burton as chairman of the Government Reform Committee. But under heavy pressure from both Republicans and Democrats on his committee, Davis was forced to schedule a public hearing in Washington on June 19.

Meanwhile, on April 10, Jackie Bulger pleaded guilty in federal court to two counts of perjury. He admitted lying in 1996 when asked about whether he’d ever visited yet another of Whitey’s safe-deposit boxes, this one in Clearwater, Florida. He also admitted lying in 1998 about his attempts to provide Whitey with new ID photos. Just before his indictment, Jackie had resigned from his beloved clerkship in an attempt to preserve his $3,778-a-month pension.

The only break Jackie caught was that the federal judge in his case, George O’Toole, was married to a woman who had contributed hundreds of dollars over the years to Jimmy Brett, the state rep who was married to Billy’s personal secretary. The feds asked for a fourteen-month sentence; O’Toole handed Jackie a four-month wrist slap. Asked by a reporter whether he should have recused himself from the case, given his family ties to the Bulgers, Judge O’Toole said he’d considered bowing out, then decided not to.